Baking

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Vegan Chocolate Cake

Half way to work this gloomy, rainy Monday morning, my phone beeped to show I had a work email. Since I was stuck in standstill traffic, I checked to see what the header of the message was. To my dismay, it was an announcement that a co-worker whom I was joking with on the previous Friday, passed away that Saturday. Not the news I wanted to hear on a cloudy rainy Monday morning. The rest of the day became a blur. I KNEW that I had to bake something to cheer myself up.

Tomorrow is my monthly Mommy Pokeno game night and I have to provide dessert. I asked couple of co-workers for some quick ideas which they provided, however, I ended up going with something vegan because we have two vegetarians in our group and didn't want to have to provide two separate options.

Who doesn't love chocolate right?

Ok, DS can do without it but that doesn't mean he doesn't like it.

Anyhow! The real test was if DH would figure out that it was vegan. When he asked what I was making, I said chocolate cake.

The recipe said to bake for 45mins at 350 degrees. It took longer to bake and I had to turn the oven down to prevent burning. I made one with vegan cocoa chips and the other without (mainly because I forgot while mixing the first batch). I could have doubled the recipe, but that didn't work well for me the first time I tried with a new recipe.

With cocoa chips

One on the left without

While they were cooling, I made the icing. Also vegan.

Side note on the icing. I felt so silly at the store. I starred at the cake section for a while looking for traditional icing containers to no avail. The kind lady that came to help pointed them out to me and I stated "no, that's cake mix". Duhhh, reading is fundamental. My excuse, I had a bad day. She then went into telling me about how she doesn't like the smell of real butter. They just happened to have the vegan butter out with some fresh bread for tasting. I was sold at first tasting.

After I made the icing, DH walks in to "taste". Talked about how good it was and wanted to do a tasting with cake. He still didn't know it was vegan.

Outside is a bit crispy but inside is super moist. DH liked it and stated that the cake would have gone really well with whipped cream. I then kindly told him that it wouldn't since I needed it to be vegan. Ah ah, was his reply and finished with, well it's still good.